Guild Wars 2

So general points:

Gear
Gear should be either full zerk or full assassin or some mixture of the two. Your survivability comes from your abilities, not from tanky stats. If you’re really having difficulty surviving, you can mix in a few pieces of knight’s gear, but you’ll want to swap those back to zerk as soon as you get better.

Runes
So you want to try and get some cheap runes for now, I’d recommend eagle runes. They’re decent damage and very cheap. Eventually you’ll want to have a full set of chronomancer runes, but those won’t be helpful until you actually get chronomancer unlocked.

Sigils
These you can be a bit loosey-goosey with. Force sigil is technically best, but honestly it’s not a huge deal.

General Gearing
You want to work towards ascended gear as soon as possible. Top priority is trinkets → weapons → armor (armor is very low priority). There’s a lot of ways to get ascended stuff, but I’ll list the best options:

• Rings: do fractals
• Amulet: Buy it with laurels
• Accessories: Buy them with guild commendations
• Backpiece: Do fractals

General builds
For PvE open world, you’ll want sword/focus + greatsword. That’s a nice mix of aoe and long range power. For dungeons/fractals, you’ll want sword/sword + sword/focus. However, I would recommend putting all of your energy into unlocking chronomancer, because nobody actually wants a mesmer in their party. Once you get chrono, you can use shield and some very powerful buffing builds that make you a valuable member in any party.